Compendium on Monte Carlo simulation of photoneutrons in the Giant Dipole Resonance energy range: The first five elements

Neutrons generated by photonuclear reactions, “photoneutrons”, are encountered in various applications involving high-energy gamma sources, electron accelerators or nuclear reactors. Monte Carlo particle-transport codes are generally used to simulate the emission of photoneutrons, characterize their field or assess their impact on nuclear systems. The aim of this work is to create a compendium on the simulation of photoneutrons using several Monte Carlo codes, i.e., MCNP6, PHITS and TRIPOLI-4, each code being run successively with ENDF/B-VIII.0 and JENDL-5 nuclear data libraries. We study the photoneutron fields produced by 50 elements with their natural isotopic composition from the reaction energy threshold up to 30 MeV, i.e., in the regime of the Giant Dipole Resonance (GDR). The photoneutron fields are characterized according to three observables, i.e., photoneutron current, energy spectrum and angular distribution. This paper presents the results obtained for the first five elements in order of increasing atomic number, i.e., deuterium, beryllium, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. The compendium could serve as a handbook for users to master the current strengths and limitations of the codes, for code developers to make progress in the sampling of neutron-emitting photonuclear reactions, and more broadly for all researchers working on photoneutrons, whether they are evaluators of nuclear data libraries or experimental nuclear physicists.